Part 4 (2/2)
The fact that Europe to-day is divided into armed camps is mainly due to English effort to retain that mastery of the sea. It is generally a.s.sumed, and the idea is propagated by English agencies, that Europe owes her burden of armaments to the antagonism between France and Germany, to the loss of Alsace-Lorraine by France, and the spirit and hope of a _revanche_ thereby engendered. But this antagonism has long ceased to be the chief factor that moulds European armaments.
Were it not for British policy, and the unhealthy hope it proffers France would ere this have resigned herself, as the two provinces have done, to the solution imposed by the war of 1870. It is England and English ambition that beget the state of mind responsible for the enormous growth of armaments that now over-shadows continental civilization. Humanity, hemmed in in Central Europe by a forest of bayonets and debarred all egress to the light of a larger world by a forbidding circle of dreadnoughts, is called to peace conferences and arbitration treaties by the very power whose fundamental maxim of rule ensures war as the normal outlook for every growing nation of the Old World.
If Europe would not strangle herself with her own hands she must strangle the sea serpent whose coils enfold her sh.o.r.es.
Inspect the foundation of European armaments where we will, and we shall find that the master builder is he who fas.h.i.+oned the British Empire. It is that empire, its claim to universal right of pre-emption to every zone and region washed by the waves and useful and necessary for the expansion of the white races, and its a.s.sertion of a right to control at will all the seas of all the world that drives the peoples of Europe into armed camps. The policy of the Boer War is being tried on a vaster scale against Europe. Just as England beat the Boers by concentration camps and not by arms, by money and not by men, so she seeks to-day to erect an armourplate barrier around the one European people she fears to meet in the field, and to turn all Central Europe into a vast concentration camp. By use of the longest purse she has already carried this barrier well towards completion. One gap remains, and it is to make sure that this opening, too, shall be closed that she now directs all the force of her efforts. Here the longest purse is of less avail, so England draws upon another armoury. She appeals to the longest tongue in history--the longest and something else.
In order to make sure the encompa.s.sing of Europe with a girdle of steel it is necessary to circle the United States with a girdle of lies. With America true to the great policy of her great founder, an America, ”the friend of all powers but the ally of none,” English designs against European civilization must in the end fail. Those plans can succeed only by active American support, and to secure this is now the supreme task and aim of British stealth and skill. Every tool of her diplomacy, polished and unpolished, from the trained envoy to the boy scout and the minor poet has been tried in turn. The pulpit, the bar, the press; the society hostess, the Cabinet Minister and the Cabinet Minister's wife, the ex-Cabinet Minister and the Royal Family itself, and last, but not least, even ”Irish nationality”--all have been pilgrims to that shrine; and each has been carefully primed, loaded, well aimed, and then turned full on the weak spots in the armour of republican simplicity. To the success of these resources of panic the falsification of history becomes essential and the vilification of the most peace-loving people of Europe. The past relations of England with the United States are to be blotted out, and the American people who are by blood so largely Germanic, are to be entrapped into an att.i.tude of suspicion, hostility and resentment against the country and race from whom they have received nothing but good. Germany is represented as the enemy, not to England's indefensible claim to own the seas, but to American ideals on the American continent. Just as the Teuton has become the ”enemy of civilization” in the Old World because he alone has power, strength of mind, and force of purpose to seriously dispute the British hegemony of the seas, so he is a.s.siduously represented as the only threat to American hegemony of the New World.
This, the key note of the attack on Germany, is sounded from every corner of the British Empire, wherever the Imperial editor, resting on the labours of the lash he wields against the coloured toilers in mine and camp, directs his eyes from the bent forms of these indentured slaves of dividend to the erect and stalwart frames of the new Goths who threaten the whole framework of Imperial dividend from across the North Sea. From the _Times_ to the obscurest news-sheet of the remotest corner of the British Dominions the word has gone forth.
The Monroe Doctrine, palladium of the Anglo-Saxon world empire, is imperilled by German ambitions, and were it not for the British fleet, America would be lost to the Americans. Wherever Englishmen are gathered to-day their journals, appealing possibly to only a handful of readers, a.s.sert that the function of the British fleet is to exclude the European States, with Germany at their head, from South America, not because in itself that is a right and worthy end to pursue, but because that continent is earmarked for future exploitation and control by their ”kinsmen” of the United States, and they need the support of those ”kinsmen” in their battle against Germany.
I need quote but a single utterance from the ma.s.s of seditious libels of this character before me to show how widespread is the propaganda of falsehood and how sustained is the effort being made to poison the American mind against the only people in Europe England genuinely fears, and therefore wholeheartedly hates.
The _Natal Mercury_ for instance, a paper written for the little town of Durban and appealing to a population of only some 30,000 whites, in a recent issue (March, 1913), devoted a leader to the approaching ”Peace Centennial” of 1914, to be held in commemoration of the signing of the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the second war between Great Britain and the American people in 1814.
”After all, blood is thicker than water,” quotes the Natal journal with satisfaction, and after pointing out some latter day indications of rapprochement between England and the United States, it goes on to proclaim the chief function of the British navy and the claim thereby established on the goodwill of America.
”We make mention of them because such incidents are likely to repeat themselves more and more frequently in that compet.i.tion for naval supremacy in Europe which compels the United States to put her own fleets into working order and to join in the work that England has. .h.i.therto been obliged to perform _unaided_.
”It is England that polices the Seven Seas, and America has reaped no small benefits from the _self-imposed task_, an aspect of the matter to which every thoughtful American is alive. There is a real and hearty recognition in the New World of the _silent barrier_ that Great Britain has set up to what might become something more than a dream of expansion into South America on the part of _one_ potent European State. It is, indeed, hardly too much to say that the maintenance of the Monroe Doctrine is at the present moment almost as fully guaranteed by England as it is by the country that enunciated the policy and is the chief gainer by it. It is a case in which a _silent understanding_ is of far greater value than a formal compact that 'would serve as a target for casual discontent on this side or that'.”
The article concludes by proclaiming ”the precious permanence of an unseen bond” and the lofty and enduring worth of ”good faith mutually acknowledged and the ultimate solidarity of mutual interests rightly perceived.” ”The ultimate solidarity” aimed at by those who direct these world-wide p.r.o.nouncements is not one of mere sterile friends.h.i.+p between the American and the British peoples. American friends.h.i.+p with England is only worth having when it can be translated by world acts into enmity against Germany.
It might truly be said of the British Empire to-day that where two or three are gathered together, there hatred of Germany shall be in the midst of them. Turn where he will, from the Colonies to England, from England to her fleet, from the seas to the air, the Englishman lives and moves and has his being in an atmosphere not of love but of hatred. And this too, a hatred, fear, and jealousy of a people who have never injured him, who have never warred upon him, and whose sole crime is that they are highly efficient rivals in the peaceful rivalry of commerce, navigation, and science.
We are told, for instance, in one of the popular London magazines for January, 1913, in an article upon the financial grievances of the British navy that were it not for Germany there would be to-day another Spithead. ”Across the North Sea is a nation that some fifty years ago was so afraid of the British navy that it panicked itself into building an iron-clad fleet.
”To-day, as the second naval power, its menace is too great for any up-to-date Spithead mutiny to come off. But the pay question was so acute that it is possibly only the Germans and their 'menace'
that saved us from the trouble.” But while the ”patriotism” of the ”lower-deck” may have been sufficiently stout to avert this peril, the patriotism of the ”quarter-deck” is giving us a specimen of its quality that certainly could not be exhibited in any other country in the world.
Even as I write I read in the ”British Review” how Admiral Sir Percy Scott attacks Admiral Lord Charles Beresford, dubs him the ”laughing-stock of the fleet,” accuses him of publis.h.i.+ng in his book _The Betrayal_ a series of ”deliberate falsehoods,” and concludes by saying that the gallant Admiral is ”not a seaman.”
And it is a fleet commanded by such Admirals as these that is to sweep the German navy from the seas!
During the Crimean war the allied British and French navies distinguished themselves by their signal failure to effect the reduction of such minor fortresses as Sveaborg, Helsingfors, and the fortified lighthouses upon the Gulf of Finland. Their respective Admirals fired their severest broadsides into each other, and the bombardment of the forts was silenced by the smart interchange of nautical civilities between the two flags.h.i.+ps. Napoleon III, who sought an explanation of this failure of his fleet, was given a reply that I cannot refrain from recommending to the British Admiralty to-day. ”Well, Sire,” replied the French diplomatist, who knew the circ.u.mstances, ”both the Admirals were old women, but ours was at least a lady.” If British Admirals cannot put to sea without incurring this risk, they might, at least, take the gunboat woman with them to prescribe the courtesies of naval debate.
That England to-day loves America, no one who goes to the private opinions of Englishmen, instead of to their public utterances, or the interested eulogies of their press, can for a moment believe.
The old dislike is there, the old supercilious contempt for the ”Yankee” and all his ways. ”G.o.d's Englishman” no more loves an American citizen now than in 1846 when he seriously contemplated an invasion of the United States, and the raising of the negro-slave population against his ”Anglo-Saxon kinsmen.”
To-day, when we hear so much of the Anglo-Saxon Alliance it may be well to revert to that page of history. For it will show us that if a British premier to-day can speak as Mr. Asquith did on December 16th, 1912, in his reference to the late American Amba.s.sador as ”a great American and a kinsman,” one ”sprung from a common race, speaking our own language, sharing with us by birth as by inheritance not a few of our most cherished traditions and partic.i.p.ating when he comes here by what I may describe as _his natural right in our domestic interests and celebrations_,” then this new-found kins.h.i.+p takes its birth not in a sense of common race, indeed, but in a very common fear of Germany.
In the year 1846, the British army was engaged in robbing the Irish people of their harvest in order that the work of the famine should be complete and that the then too great population of Ireland should be reduced within the limits ”law and order” prescribed, either by starvation or flight to America.
<script>